The Solarium is an art project for Burning Man 2011. It is a domed structure about 8' in diameter and 8' tall with space inside for approximately 6 people. The inside of the dome will be lined with color LEDs spaced every 5" which will simulate a sunrise and sunset once every 9 minutes throughout the night. During the day solar panels will recharge a set of deep cycle batteries that power the project.
The code for this project is written in C and compiled for the Marvell™ PXA270 microprocessor. This is the processor for the Gumstix Verdex Pro (http://www.gumstix.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=209) that will run the Solarium.
The code will communicate with the light controller devices via the I2C serial interface. The devices are NXPs PCA9635 (http://www.nxp.com/documents/data_sheet/PCA9635.pdf). There are 108 devices split into groups of three to control red, green or blue LEDs. Each group of three is mounted on a PCB called a "Ray" (as in "ray of light"). Since each device can control 16 single LEDs, the Ray as a whole can control 16 RGB LEDs. There will be 36 Rays.
You'll need to setup the Gumstix buildroot to so that you can cross compile for the PXA270. The instructions are simple, but there are a lot of dependencies required that you'll have to install:
svn co -r 1161 http://svn.gumstix.com/gumstix-buildroot/trunk gumstix-buildroot cd gumstix-buildroot make defconfig make
Getting version 1161 is important because that is the version of the image on the gumstix I currently have and other versions may not be binary compatible. Additional resources can be found here:
http://docwiki.gumstix.org/index.php/Buildroot
- applied extra/gumstix-buildroot.dff patch prior to make defconfig
- Must install texinfo
- make MAKEINFO=/usr/bin/makeinfo
- Add third parameter to open at toolchain_build_arm_nofpu/gcc-3.4.5/gcc/collect2.c:1537
- Download zlib by hand and stick it in the dl directory (sourceforge is silly).
- Add <linux/limits.h> to build_arm_nofpu/linux-2.6.18gum/scripts/mod/sumversion.c
- add -dirty suffix to KERNEL_VERSION in build_arm_nofpu/diethotplug-0.4/Makefile
- Download sysfsutils by hand and stick it in the dl directory.